Easy Mac Hacks: Disable the Mail Reply Animation

Every Monday we show you how to do something quick and cool using built-in OS X utilities such as Terminal, Apple’s command line application. These easy hacks can make life better and simpler, and don’t require any knowledge of coding — all you need is a keyboard to type 'em out!

If you use Mail.app on a regular basis, then you probably know about the fancy animations that it uses to animate in the reply message view. While this animation is fun, it does add time to composing a reply message. If you want to speed this process up a bit — and get rid of that fancy animation — then you can use the following handy tip, which makes it easy for you to disable and re-enable this animation right from the command line.

Disable the Animation

To disable the animation in Mail.app, launch the Terminal application (located in /Applications/Utilities), then type in the following command to completely remove the reply animation:

After typing this command, and restarting Mail, then your reply animation will be re-enabled, and visible when pressing the reply button to compose a reply message.

The Fix for Mavericks

If you are running Mavericks, then these commands will not work like they did for previous versions of OS X. Fortunately, there is an open-source plugin for Mail that can help you out. Follow the guide located here for more information on disabling the Mail animations in Mavericks.